24 September 2010

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Uncle Boonmee (Loong Boonmee Raleuk Chat) puts mystical Buddhism in action, the abstract into practice. It’s a treatise on the illusion we call our lives, a densely spiritual and politically symbolic film about fungible borders: between life and death, between animals and people, between the hallucinatory and the real, even between nations. Shooting in Northeast Thailand, where he grew up, Apichatpong adopts the region’s animism and suffuses the lushly verdant landscape with so much life it becomes a character—or, stuffed with characters, a natural world swirling with spirits, where Monkey Ghosts dine with men, catfish fuck human princesses, and Laotians mingle amicably with native Thais.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2010 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine